by Neil Hetzner
Dilly enjoyed her victory for only a moment before she continued with her mother’s debriefing. By the end of an hour, all of Dilly’s preconceptions about the what and how of Bett’s diagnosis and treatment, ideas which she had been fabricating from the moment of her father’s phone call, ideas constructed from the extensive collection of newspaper, television, magazine and anecdotal scraps which Dilly held helter-skelter in her mind, all of Dilly’s pre-conceptions were proved true despite what her mother said to the contrary.
After an hour of being grilled, Bett felt as sapped as she had the second morning after her surgery—after all the anesthetic had been absorbed by her body, and after her cells had had a chance to understand the carpet bombing they had been through. Bett said she was tired and asked Dilly if she would mind if she took a quick nap.
No one in the Koster family, except for her father, ever took naps. To hear her mother admit to tiredness in the middle of a brilliant blue and gold September day, the kind of perfect day when a million things could be accomplished, was as shocking to Dilly as the altered sound of Bett’s voice had been. Dilly started to say something to rally her mother from tiredness, but, suddenly, she stopped. An unwelcome truth tried to well over her. Surrounding her mother with talk and, more importantly, deadening her own fearsome thoughts with non-stop chatter would not diminish the threat to her mother, nor, and again more importantly, the threat to herself. Her vulnerability cut Dilly with a lancination as sharp and precise as a surgeon’s probe. She reached for her mother’s hand and squeezed it. As she did, Dilly was unsure for whom the reassuring gesture was meant.
After Dilly left the room, Bett stared at the swirls of motes coursing up and down the shards of bright light coming in at the edge of the blinds. She tried to think of something from which she could draw strength. A few minutes later she noticed the far off whir of the food processor. Before she fell into a light sleep, Bett smiled and ruefully shook her head at the thought of her oldest daughter, and in so many ways, her youngest child, reducing anything and everything vegetative in the kitchen to a healthful sludge.
Less than an hour later, a full deposition’s worth of new questions drove Dilly back up the stairs to Lise’s room. She found her mother sleeping. Bett kept her breathing regular and her lids still until Dilly turned from the doorway and made her way back downstairs again.
It wasn’t until after her father had been offered and meekly eaten a zucchini-laden ersatz gazpacho, until after the dishes were done and the sun had slid so far down in the sky that her mother’s face was enshrouded beyond recognition that Dilly found the courage to ask the questions to which she had no preconceived answers. In the garnet gloam of her sister’s bedroom, with much of the heat of the day still lingering in its darkened corners, Dilly listened to Bett explain the regimen that she would undergo in the ensuing months. As soon as her wounds had had a chance to heal, she would begin six weeks of radiologic treatments. Depending upon the outcome from the radiation, there was a small chance that a program of chemotherapy might be needed. Although the doctors were somewhat guarded, as they always were, as nearly as Bett could tell they were confident that things would be okay. They acted as if the radiation was primarily cautionary and that there would be no need for chemotherapy. She herself planned to do what was suggested. She wasn’t afraid to fight. She had lost a breast. She might lose her appetite. She might lose sleep or, even, some hair. But, Bett assured Dilly, she was not going to lose her life. There was too much to live for. She asked Dilly to tell her sisters and brother that their mother would need room to fight back against the cancer. She would need the freedom to fight more than she would need constant attention. If she needed help, she assured Dilly that she would ask for it. She promised they would talk on the phone often, but she asked the visits be kept to a minimum, at least until the radiation treatment was completed.
As she nodded yes to her mother’s requests, Dilly was pondering how she would get around them. Her mother needed her. Maybe not as much as a child, but a lot.
* * *
“She lied to us. I can’t believe it.”
“Dilly, she didn’t.”
“No one knew.”
“That’s her right.”
“We could have helped.”
“We could have hurt.”
“I can’t believe you’re not upset.”
“I can’t believe you are. No, that’s not true. I can, but, Dilly, it’s her body, her health, and her right to choose the treatment and the environment. If she didn’t want to tell us, either because she didn’t want to worry us or because she didn’t want the confusion of having us around, that is her prerogative.”
“Well, if that’s true, then what’s family supposed to mean? What is the point of being in a family if not to share these things? Tell me that, Nita.”
“Dilly, she did share it. Just not on the schedule you would have preferred. By the way, if it’s not too forward of me, how is she? How’s she feel? How’s she look?”
“She looks terrible, how else would she look? You should see her, Nita. She looks haggard. She’s lost a tremendous amount of weight. Her tan’s all gray.”
“A little weight loss shouldn’t hurt her. How’s she feel?”
“She hurts. I mean they cut her whole breast off. God, how big a scar is that? I can’t even believe it. No one has a mastectomy anymore. It’s medieval. Lumpectomy. Everyone gets a lumpectomy. That surgeon, Falconi, who I certainly never heard of before today, have you, must hate women.”
“I doubt it. Informed consent holds. Doctors have to spell out the alternatives. The patient makes the choice. I had a client last year who had a double mastectomy before they even found any cancer. Her mother and older sister had both died of breast cancer. She didn’t want to chance it, so she had both of them removed. They took her breasts; her husband took a walk; I took the case. I saw her not too long ago at an aerobics class. She’s sure that she made the right choice. A new husband’s a lot easier to get than a new life. She’d watched her sister die.”
“That’s not going to happen here.”
“No one said it was.”
“It’s just so hard to believe. Stupid, too. I never thought that I’d say that about Mother.”
“Fill me in. Why stupid?’
“You know what? She hadn’t been doing BSE. Who knows for how long.”
“BSE being?”
“NIIITTTAAAA!”
Nita felt the muscles of her neck tighten as her sister dragged out the sound of her name as if she were a vendor at Boston’s Haymarket. It was a sound that Dilly had been making for more than thirty years. Nita vividly recalled years of racing around the neighborhood or home from school. Dilly, four years older, would stop running and turn back toward her to impatiently shout, NIIITTTAAAA!, to demand that her little sister run faster. By the time Nita was nine she could run faster than her overweight sister. As she raced ahead, Nita would hear Dilly imploring her to slow down by breathlessly yelling, NIIITTTAAAA!
“BSE. Breast self-examination. Don’t tell me you don’t do it either.”
“Of course, I do. But, I live in a world of acronyms. I don’t remember all of them.”
“I can’t believe she wasn’t checking herself.”
“I guess I can.”
“You can?”
“Sure. Mom’s always taken better care of everyone else than herself.”
“I can’t get over it. My mother doesn’t check herself, she gets cancer, she has major surgery, she stays in the hospital for eight days, and she, and Dad, too, dammit, don’t tell anyone. What if she’d died? Dad would call, ‘Oh, by the way, your mother passed away during surgery. Pass it on. I’ve got the lawn to mow.’”
“She didn’t. When’s the radiation start?”
“They’re not sure. She has to heal some more…”
While listening to her sister, Nita remembered the many times when they were young that Dilly had insisted on nursing her. Being nursed by Dilly was
like being a mouse being played with by a cat. Every time the mouse would start to escape, the cat would stun it with a controlled blow. If the mouse remained still too long, the cat would toss it into the air to perk it up. As a child, if Nita were feverish and fussy and wanted a story read to her, Dilly would be apt to tuck the too hot covers around her, command her to shut her eyes, and then turn off the light. If Nita were to fall asleep, then Dilly would wake her up to read her a story. In Nita’s opinion, the goal of Dilly’s ministrations had been less the comfort of the patient and more the chance to control someone.
As Dilly fumed over the phone, Nita found herself thinking of what she had felt upon learning that Bett had had surgery. From the moment she had heard her mother’s voice, Nita had known that something was wrong. As her mother went through the chronology of what had happened, Nita had found herself wanting to stop her, or, at least, to guide the narrative as she might coach a witness. As Bett proceeded, Nita had found herself freefalling through her memory. She had had the urge to throw her arms and legs out wide to increase the resistance, to guide the descent, to brake the fall.
Nita remembered how, for ten years, she had lived on the edge of her life knowing that something had been done to her that could cause her body’s processes to throw off their law-like behavior, to catapult her over the edge. Although she had gone on with many aspects of her life and had done so with a spirit and strength that all around her had admired, a part of Nita, an intensely aware, energy-consuming aspect of her, had maintained a constant, vertiginous, fearful vigilance. The years had passed…slowly… until, finally, at the age of twenty-five she had been given statistical permission to step back from the edge.
When Bett described the details of what had happened in the hospital and what was ahead, Nita re-experienced the sense of being edged toward an abyss. She had wondered if her mother had wakened yet in the middle of the night with the same sense that Nita herself had often had that some malign aspect of her body had taken advantage of her loss of consciousness to begin its errant growth. Had her mother, too, learned to fear falling asleep?
As she had listened to her mother that morning, Nita had heard a second voice, a voice usually too soft to hear either often or clearly, express satisfaction at the justice of her mother experiencing what she herself had had to feel for so long. Nita recoiled from that gloating whisper, but she had heard it enough times, both as a reader of newspaper tragedies and as a lawyer, not to try to pretend that it was anything other than her own surviving victim victor’s voice. She knew that the voice, whose timbre was no stronger than the rustle of papers in a crowded courtroom, was a sibling to Dilly’s strident whining. She knew that its bare audibility made it no less selfish than Dilly’s clarion call.
In her practice of family law, having seen the rapacious results of failed marriages—blindly hungry adults and achingly needy children—Nita had often wondered how she and Dilly, and Peter, and who knew about Lise, could be so needy. It was hard to understand how parents as kind and loving, forthright and generous as Neil and Bett could produce such a group of misfits. Having grown up seven years his junior, it was hard for Nita to remember how Peter had been as a child, but as an adult he seemed to be a mass of scars, like someone who had fallen through a plate glass window. Despite knowing how the DES threats had changed her, Nita had a hard time understanding how it was possible that one year in Viet Nam could transcend and transplant twenty-two years of Bett and Neil’s parenting. As early as Nita could remember things had never been right for Dilly. Whatever there was, it was never enough. No amount of love or attention, or subservience, or food had ever been enough. And Nita herself, did that mockingly gentle voice of mean-mindedness come solely from the years of threat brought by the DES, or was it something present long before the threat of disease and death? She didn’t know. In many ways it was as hard for her to remember how she was before the DES threat as it was to remember Peter growing up. When she thought about it, as she always must when she heard the tiny voice, she wasn’t even sure that she wanted to know the answer. If the DES truly had changed her, what did that say for her character?
Nita cut off her own thinking to catch the tail end of Dilly’s explanation of the tattoo that Bett would get to insure the proper targeting of the gamma rays.
“How long are you staying?”
“I’m not sure. I have to talk to Bill about the kids. Maybe a week. Maybe more.”
“Dilly, are you sure? Are you sure being there that long is going to be a help?”
“Of course. She’s weak. She needs help.”
“Did she say that? Did she tell you that she wanted you to stay that long?”
“No, Nita, she didn’t. Is that relevant? You just said that she has a hard time asking for help.”
“Not really, but, you’re right, she does have a hard time asking. But, I also think that she doesn’t want or need a lot. Just ask her, or ask Dad.”
“When are you coming?”
“I can’t come until late in the weekend. It’s a terrible week. I’ll drive down on Saturday night, or day trip on Sunday. If she wants visitors.”
“Really, Nita, I can’t believe you’re not on your way, now. After all the nursing she’s given you.”
“Don’t start, Dilly. I’ve got a week’s worth of work to do tomorrow and Saturday. When I talked to Mom this morning…”
“What do you mean this morning? She called you?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Well, Dad called me.”
“Dilly, don’t. A family’s not a contest.”
“Oh, no? That’s funny coming from you, Nita. Isn’t that what you do for a living? Turn a family into a contest? Determine the winners and losers?”
Nita didn’t want to reopen an argument that Dilly had tried to make ever since law school. Dilly professed to believe that it was the large numbers of lawyers, most of whom obviously were unscrupulous, who were responsible for half of America’s marriages ending in divorce. She didn’t want to do something that would push a member of her family apart at a time when it needed to be drawing together. She didn’t want to begin an argument that might get so heated that she would feel compelled to draw the weaknesses of Dilly and Dilly’s marriage into the fight.
“How’s her appetite? What’s she eating?”
“If you were here, you’d know.”
“Dammit, Dilly, back off. I’m not looking for a fight.”
“I’m not fighting. I’m just stating a fact. If you want to know more about her, come down to see her.”
“I’m planning to.”
“When it’s convenient.”
“No, Dilly, when it’s possible.”
“Leave it to Dilly. She’s got nothing better to do.”
“Look, Dilly, I know this has probably scared the hell out of you. I can understand that. It scares me, too, but you are really whacked. Maybe I’ll see you Saturday night.”
The phone clicked before Dilly knew what she wanted to say. After she dropped the receiver back onto its cradle, Dilly savored how she was always being victimized. People either took her for granted or they dismissed her. After eating just the frosting off that feeling and saving the cake for later, Dilly picked the phone back up and dialed her home. She spent the next half hour telling her children what they should wear to school in the morning and telling Bill what all of them should eat over the weekend.
After she had hung up, Dilly went looking for her father. She found him sitting in the wicker rocker on the dark porch. Pushing through the screen door she didn’t know whether she wanted to sit at his feet and cry or tell him to get out of the damp before he gave himself arthritis.
* * *
Before going to bed, Nita stood naked in front of the full length mirror secured to her bedroom door and looked at her breasts. Later, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, she tried to drown out the smug little voice that had been nattering all day. She thought that if she could just rid herself of that venal judge that s
he might do what she had not been able to do for a very long time. Cry.
* * *
Peter Koster drew the woven wire Chinese skimmer across the simmering water. Silvery cloves of garlic swam before the metal mesh like fish in a seine. He dumped his catch into a sauce pan of cold water. As he waited for the garlic to cool enough that the peels could be slipped easily from the cloves, he looked around the kitchen to the multiple sources of noise.
Ron, the dishwasher, or Ron the Dishwasher, as everyone called him in honor of his dedication—a slow dim-witted but OCD-focused, overweight and ugly man in his early thirties—was banging the edges of pots against the stainless steel counter as he directed his high pressure rinsing nozzle into the pots’ acid-darkened interiors. Peter wondered if Ron the Dishwasher were discovering that love was as hard to find in the gay world as it had been in the heterosexual one that he just recently, and quite publicly, had decided to abandon. The alcoholic salad man, Harold, was laying down a frantic Buddy Rich beat as he used two ten-inch chef knives to chop up a heads of iceberg and romaine lettuce. Despite dozens of admonitions to cut the greens to a certain size, the consistency of Harold’s salads was determined by a music only he could hear. Peter hoped that the Harold’s solo would end before everything was turned into the kind of limp shreds that were to be found on the fast food chains’ most expensive hamburgers, but he grew resigned as Harold segued from a four-four beat into nine-eight time. Although it was hard to tell with all the other noises interfering, Peter thought that he was probably hearing the percussion line from an old Cab Calloway tune.
Raoul was busy baiting Ron the Dishwasher by wiping supposed spots from the bowls and blades and tines of the silverware he was sorting. Angry from seeing Raoul re-polishing his work and hurt from knowing that the maitre d’ belittled his decision to enter into the gay world, Ron the Dishwasher banged his pots louder. Imperiously ignoring his late-blooming compadre’s tympanically manifested anguish, Raoul continued to toss clean flatware into the appropriate drawers of the steel work table. Each toss made the discordant clang of a warped cymbal. None of Raoul’s noises harmonized with any of Harold’s rhythms nor with Ron the Dishwasher’s near demonic lonesome banging.